Storage The Story of the Server with too many hard drives...

Thanks, that is somewhat reassuring. Might splash out on a new PSU anyway if I can find one with enough/more SATA power connectors but good to know its probably not the underlying issue.

Will just give Storage Spaces a kick in the head...
Having played with it more, i can create new spaces with the new drives, but it wont let me add them to existing spaces... Right pain.

 

Having done similar research in the past, finding PSUs with 12+ SATA connectors is awkward / expensive as you end up having to buy a 1kW PSU just to get the connectors you need - e.g. https://www.scan.co.uk/products/100...ossfire-single-rail-833a-plus12v-1x135mm-fan- has 12 SATA. If you go below 1kW you end up with ~9 connectors or fewer (at least with EVGA). I was running 11 HDDs and 1 SSD off a 650W EVGA SuperNOVA G3 which only has 6 SATA connectors but using some splitters (6 of them in fact) I've managed to power all of my drives with no problems. I've since scaled back to 'only' 10 HDDs and 1 SSD but not for power reasons.

 

Before the days of PSU bloat, I was running 10x 7200rpm disks and 2x 15k disks on a 430w with no issues to speak of.

 

Ditto my experiences, my first build at uni was a stack of 8 3.5" HDDs running off a BQ 550W. No issues. Hard drives are peanuts in power terms. If the problem seems distinctly power-related in nature, I'd be looking suspiciously at the power supply or extension cables. You could realistically stick about 30-40 HDDs on a modern PSU without issues.

This thread is kinda like looking into the past for me, in two ways. First, you're spending a lot of money on HDDs and putting them in mirror pairs. That's exactly what I did. I have since moved away from that setup and never looked back - and after 8 years working in IT and experimenting with different setups, believe me, if there were hard and attractive benefits to mirror pairs, I would have realised it. There aren't, and I second the (admittedly off-topic) comments questioning the wisdom of huge mirror pairs that had you so riled up.

Which brings me to the second way in which this thread has made me nostalgic for my past self: you're getting huffy and lashing out at people trying their honest best to give you good advice. This is also something I did a lot back then, and in the most brotherly and supportive spirit possible, I urge you to try to break the habit as soon as possible. When you make a thread enquiring about an obscure technical issue and several knowledgeable boffins reply trying to offer guidance and wisdom, every reply is a free gift. They could just as easily keep on walking and not help at all. I have at times sabotaged myself by getting rude towards the people replying to my queries in forums - the result is always that people become disinclined to help you again. In the real world you generally have to pay for expert advice. Getting it for free is a form of charity, and we must be grateful and respectful when it's given. If it isn't the answer we want, we should be in the mindset of "thank you, but I'm not worried about that, I prefer doing it this way". Not "you people are wasting my time, nobody has addressed my issue here". You haven't paid a fee to ask your question. Nobody has to address your issue at all. We could all reply with cat photos and you'd technically not be getting any worse value for money out of this forum.

You probably won't appreciate me saying this, but it's just the truth, and I say it without malice. You get less out of these kinds of forums if you berate the people trying to help you out.

To which end, I will risk annoying you further by saying: mirror pairs are not a good solution. They wear each drive equally, increasing the risk of concurrent failures; they duplicate instantly, providing no redundancy against mistakes, deletions, formats or corruption; they increase power consumption. A better solution is to have an active sync backup like File History or SyncToy backing one drive up to it's twin. The benefits are the inverse of all of the problems listed above: they provide redundancy against mistakes, formats, deletions and corruption, and they reduce power consumption and the risk of drive failure (because the backup drives are only spun up and used to copy modifications, and are idle the rest of the time). Mirror pairs are also annoying to rebuild, whereas if your backup drives are just file level copies of the content, when a primary drive fails you can simply swap drive letters on the backup, add a new drive as the new backup, and carry right on using the previous backup as the primary while your sync utility of choice gradually copies the data to the new backup drive in the background. Lastly, file level arrangements like this are more versatile: you can physically rearrange drives any way you like and just reassign letters to keep things working, since sync utilities only key off of drive letters. Need more room internally and want to switch some of the backup drives to externals? Change drive letters, let it resync, done.

These truth bombs were dropped in the spirit of friendship and supportiveness. Make of them what you will.

 

Looking at your setup in my opinion with all the smaller arrays there appears to be a lot of wasted capacity and potentially electricity.

Back in the day when I used to use a Windows Home Server box, I used to use a product called Stable Bit DrivePool.

What this does is let you pool your drives together and set duplication at the folder level.

I'll try explain but forgive me if it isnt too clear:

You have the following setup:

Drive1 2TB
Drive2 2TB
Drive3 3TB
Drive4 4TB

Which makes a pool with the capacity 11TB

Then in your pool you have the following folders
Documents
Movies
Scratch

Your documents are super important so you set it so it keeps 4 copies of the file, one of each of the hard drive
Your movie folder is less important to you so you set it at 2 copies, it will spread this across the pool so there is always two copies of the file
Finally scratch you dont give a crap about so the folder duplication is only set at one folder.

Whats nice is, you are able to maximize your space and set different levels of redundancy at a folder level. Also the drives are bog standard NTFS formatted so if the hardware dies its possible to move the entire thing to another machine and recover the pool (having installed the app) or pulling the files from individual drives.

This was nice to cut my teeth on back in the day and over the years I have tried various solutions including QNAP, DSM, OpenIndiana, etc. Currently I am playing with OMV 5 with UnionFS and SNAPRAID plugins!

It does have its drawbacks, as mentioned "mirrors" are no substitute for proper backup and does not account for accidental modification / file corruption.